Urban Geoscience Education
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
If you grew up in an urban area, surrounded by concrete and asphault and never set foot on a natural landscape, would that affect your ability to learn Earth science? I think so!
Along with the physical migration to cities, recent shifts in technology have isolated young people even more from the natural world. These two changes have created what I call “an urban thinker” – someone who has minimal exposure and familiarity with the natural world and is therefore more comfortable in the built environment than natural settings. There are more urban thinkers than ever before, but many of us are still using the same techniques to teach geology that we were a few decades ago. We need to consider some fundamental questions about the way people think:
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•What are differences between people who grow up in urban and non-urban settings?
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•What pre-conceptions do urban thinkers have that inhibit learning about the natural world? Or does it only affect motivation/desire to learn?
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•How can we bridge the gap between the familiar built environment that urban thinkers know and the natural world that we want them to learn about in Earth science?
My students and I are starting to create some solutions that will help us begin to answer these questions.
Publications and Presentations:
d'Alessio, M. A., 2012. Schoolyard geology as a bridge between urban thinkers and the natural world. Journal of Geoscience Education, in press. [Download Article]
d’Alessio, M. A., 2009. Schoolyard Geology: Leading simple geologic excursions on your school playground, California Science Teachers’ Association Annual Meeting, Palm Springs, CA, 2010-October-25. [Abstract]
d'Alessio, M. A., 2005. Schoolyard Geology. U.S. Geological Survey web publication, http://education.usgs.gov/schoolyard, 2005-December-15.
d'Alessio, M. A., Pehl, J., Ferrier, K., and C. Pehl. 2004. Teaching Geology at San Quentin State Prison. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting Supplement 85, Abstract ED51C-0032.
d'Alessio, M. A., Pehl, J., Ferrier, K., and C. Pehl. 2004. Teaching Geology at San Quentin State Prison. Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs 36(5), p. 239.
Can you spot the geologic principles of superposition, crosscutting relations, and original horizontality in this image?
Schoolyard Geology helps bridge the gap between the built environment familiar to urban thinkers and the natural processes that we want them to learn about in Earth science.